To dissolve, submerge, and cause to disappear the political or governmental system in the economic system by reducing, simplifying, decentralizing and suppressing, one after another, all the wheels of this great machine, which is called the Government or the State. --Proudhon, General Idea of the Revolution

Thursday, October 27, 2005

Counter-establishment economic activity (counter-economics — a.k.a. “the black market”) is the only tool that can eventually build institutions of security and law independent of state control. In the mean time, it makes peoples lives better for themselves here and now....

Because counter-economics focuses on making peoples lives better here and now, it’s something useful that people can incorporate into their lives, yet it lays the groundwork for eventually laying the state low.

2 Comments:

Very interesting, I find Brad's argument compelling. I think a lot of the split between some lifestyle anarchists and some of the left-libertarians comes down to semantics, perspective and background. I don't yet feel comfortable with terms like "free market" and "counter-economics" and such things, but these are definetly what we have been developing for some time.

Building the beginnings of the new within the old, ichneumon wasp style, has happened before, most notably at the Christendom/Dar el Islam frontier and in particular in the Ghazi phase of Ottoman growth at Byzantine expense (two borothers actually planned how they would do it over generations). For today, you might start a dummy corporation to interface to the corporatist world and hope to beat them before you joined them. You might try to transcend national frontiers. Note to those Vermonters in an earlier thread - Gerald Bull tried these things in Vermont, and in the end a nation state assassinated him.